to ashes to dust
by leiascully
Summary: A meditation on autumn melancholy, death, life, and cold.


Cameron throws up after she does it. She can't stop thinking of the way he looked at her when she stepped into the room with the leather bundle of syringe and morphine under her arm. All he said was "Nothing to regret, girl." He smiled as she jabbed the syringe into the IV and she had his life in her hands for thirty seconds and just watched him fade away.

She sits in her living room with a glass of wine, bundled up in the afghan her grandmother knitted, but she can't get warm. She has his death on her hands, and even though he begged for it, it wears on her. She sat in the chapel all day and House let her. She thinks she can still feel his fingers on her shoulder. Cameron knows she has grown up in his eyes; she also knows that she is not the one to ease his pain.

Since she came to work for House, she has lost her footing in the moral world. She has been a champion of ethics, of fair and compassionate practice, and it has not given her life the meaning she expected. House disregards her and what he does comes out right and whole most of the time. His ease, the way he goes on living and being correct, skews her idea of what life should be, but she is finally growing up. It is an aching, lonely feeling.

He is proud of her. It is almost enough, except that she is still shivering.

+

Cuddy goes home that night and takes a long hot shower, just letting the water beat down on her shoulders. House's culpability weighs on her, added to her own guilt. Even if he isn't personally responsible for Powell's death, he is legally responsible and so is she, and there will be no lawsuit, but she worries for him. He has never been good at losing patients or letting go, even if he found a diagnosis.

She wraps herself in a robe when she gets out of the shower. It's cooler than it has been. She will make some mint tea, the real kind with leaves from her little windowbox of herbs, and she will call House, she thinks. Because she does sometimes, when she remembers how long they've known each other, since they were people instead of doctors, and he doesn't always feel like talking, but he plays the piano while she listens and she remembers college and the cocoon of Michigan winters, studying at his apartment while he practiced. She puts him on speakerphone so she doesn't wake up on the couch with one ear sweaty and painful from the pressure of the receiver, and she listens, and she thinks he talks to her sometimes, quiet over the piano, and only when she's asleep, though she doesn't know how he knows when she sleeps.

She sits on the couch with her hand over her flat, childless belly and sips at her tea, even though it's still hot enough to scald her. At least it keeps the cold away while she waits for him to get home with his pill bottle in his pocket and his whiskey bottle in his backpack. They have unfinished business. They have always had unfinished business.

He will not feel like talking tonight, but she will listen anyway, and he will play that Bach piece that she loves.

+

House goes to the liquor store before he goes home. He'd go to the bar for the jumble of noise and the entertainment that naturally follows when idiots interact with OH groups, but the bike has a scrape already, and he's still mad at Wilson. He wants to drink alone, with his leg and his Vicodin and his piano. There's a chill in the air and Cuddy will probably call, and he'll think of the dark waves of her hair and her skin all damp from the bath and he'll drink and play for her. She is the oldest friend he's got and he is in love with her, when he stops to think about it, which is only on very dark nights.

He is proud of Cameron. He will play something a little triumphant for her. No 1812 Overture, but she deserves something with more depth than "Girl From Ipanema" today. She has grown up and it is not an easy thing to do. He half laughs to himself as he limps down the aisle at the liquor store: she will not want him anymore, but just as she gives up, a younger, perkier girl is there to take her place. He has never though of himself as a handsome man, or a breaker of hearts, but these girls keep looking at him with their eyes soft and he will never understand it. Someday, he thinks, when Cameron is a little older, when this pining adolescent Ali is older, they will understand that it's the fights that makes love worth it. It is the way Cuddy props her hands on her hips and shouts at him. It is the way he pushes at her, all his mad scientist ideas against her compassionate medicine, and the way her eyes snap and the fact that she still loves him through the yelling.

Cameron is his girl, finally: his mentee, his daughter. He has finally taught her something. That means that maybe one day she'll be the one under the nauseating buzz of the fluourescent lights, choosing a brand of whiskey, but maybe life won't blindside her. He hopes.

He pulls a bottle off the shelf and pays for it. He drives home too fast, just like always, racing the ache in his leg. The wind bites through his jacket and he shivers hard enough to rattle the bike a little, but his apartment will be warmer, and his piano is waiting.

Chase goes to Mass. He sits in the pew with his hands clasped together in his lap, one foot jouncing from time to time. He prays, or tries to: it is a wordless, questioning hope for a better world. Cameron was in the locker room all day. When he went in, she was trying to drown herself in the showers. He could hear her crying over the splash of the water and he almost went in to find her. Chase has never been one of those manly manly men, but Cameron is little and pretty and he feels protective about her sometimes, in a way he can't really explain. He is not sure how or why, but he cares. He tries not to think about it.

He has not been to Mass in a long while, but the Latin is reassuring in its impenetrability, and the way the pew presses into his legs and makes his back ache is a comforting penance. He thinks of Ezra Powell. He thinks of his father. Good men, or good doctors, who died, and he was ready to have a hand in their deaths. He drew the blinds against Brenda's stare so that House could push the morphine through the plastic tubing into Powell's veins. He turned away from his father because there were days he wanted to shove the remnants of his mother's broken gin bottles into his father's face, to make him see, to make him hurt like they were hurting. Then again, all his preparation was for nothing. At the crucial moment it was Cameron, or it was cancer, and he has made himself strong for nothing.

Pure like gold. He wanted to be pure like gold and the crucible brought him unhappy truths instead. He is weak. He could not save his mother and he forgave his father. If he had stayed angry, maybe Kayla would have lived. Pride, lust, sloth: he is victim to all of these. He has a good job, a twisted father figure of a boss (and House for all his cantankerous diffidence will die someday too), and no one to go home to, no one to murmur at in the middle of the night. Except that there was Cameron once, the two of them in her bed, and that was better than he'd expected. He thinks of her now, how the miserable shape of her must have looked in the shower with her bangs plastered over her pale forehead, and it's wrong because he's in church, but it's wrong in such a familiar way.

Foreman goes home and wakes up his girlfriend with kisses, the long slow kind he never has time for these days. It has been a long day even though there was nothing to do. He and Chase finished up the charting for Powell and then sat, doing nothing, staring through the window until it was time to spend a few hours in the clinic. After clinic they came back and stared through the window again, arranging the last crumbs from yesterday's muffins in tiny, pointless mosaics. They sat and sat and did the puzzles from the newspaper and transcribed some of House's dictations and then it had been dark for a while and they went home.

There are days when Foreman is glad that Cuddy was jerking him around about being permanent head of the department and this is one of them. He is ashamed that of all of them, it was Cameron who had the courage to release the old man. There are no dignified deaths, maybe, but there are dignified choices about death. Being a doctor didn't get him away from making choices that are about bravery instead of science. He always thought he would be the big shoulders, a man with plenty of brains to back up his brawn, objectively compassionate, unimpeachably moral. He has tried so hard not to be the kid from the hood. He thought the M.D. redeemed him. Instead he's tried to kill his colleague, a woman with most of her life ahead of her, but he didn't have the guts to depress a plunger and farewell an accomplished man with only pain to look forward to.

Foreman chooses life. He has never felt guilty about that before.

Wilson has a glass of red wine as he makes macadamia nut pancakes in his empty apartment that is still full of boxes because he's stopped caring enough to unpack. He has been making pancakes all week and it has not been enough to get him back into House's good graces, but he serves his punishment with as much dignity as possible. Winter will come and things are changing.

He drinks the wine and does not wish there were more to his life, which almost makes him sad.


End file.
